Posts Tagged ‘iran talks’

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that the demerging deal between the P5+1 powers and Iran is so bad that it actually will help and not prevent Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Speaking at the annual ceremony in memory of Theodor Herzl, the Prime Minister stated:

Iran, the leading patron of terrorism in the world, is squeezing more and more concessions from the major powers…. The concessions agreement that Iran is about to receive from the major powers paves the way for it to arm itself with nuclear weapons and deliver them via the missiles that it is continuing to develop…..

How can Iran be given hundreds of billions of dollars without this money being conditioned on it not being used to grease the wheels of its ramified terrorist machine?

He added that Iran’s increasing aggression is much more dangerous than that of the Islamic State (ISIS) but Iran’ like ISIS, wants “to take over the world.”

The Obama administration is leaning on Jewish leftists to pressure Jewish Congressmen to support an Iran deal by touting a J Street poll claiming that nearly two-thirds of American Jews support an agreement.

The Washington Free Beacon reported Matt Nosanchuk, the White House’s liaison to the Jewish community, advised dozens of “progressive” groups Monday to use the poll to convinced Jews in Congress to back a deal.

Nosanchuk reportedly talked with more than 100 Jewish officials in a meeting organized by the Ploughshares Fund, which the Beacon wrote “has spent millions of dollars to slant Iran-related coverage and protect the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts.”

The report comes two days after TheJewishPress.com wrote here that a recent meeting between senior White House officials and the anti-IDF Breaking the Silence group furthers President Barack Obama’s attempt to make the Jewish left, led by J Street, appear to represent the mainstream American Jewish community.

The J Street website last year ran a headline in capital letters, “Tell your senators: Don’t undermine Iran negotiations with new sanctions.”

It followed with the results of its own poll and an incredulous claim that implies that J Street speaks for most American Jews and that anyone who thinks differently is “underling” President Obama. The website wrote:

While 62% of American Jews support the way President Obama is handling Iran’s nuclear program, organizations that claim to represent the American Jewish community are undermining his approach by pushing for new and harsher penalties against Iran.

TELL YOUR SENATORS:

Though some American Jewish organizations are pushing new sanctions that will undoubtedly undermine negotiations, the vast majority of the American Jewish community supports President Obama’s diplomatic approach to Iran’s nuclear program.

That was last November, when a final agreement was to be reached by November 30.

Last month, J Street published another poll:

American Jews express strong support for a final agreement with Iran that increases inspections in exchange for economic sanctions relief. Fifty-nine percent say they would support such a deal, compared to 53 percent of American adults in an April CNN poll that asked the same question….

‘When it comes to the best way to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, these results make clear that American Jews overwhelmingly support the president’s diplomatic efforts,’ said J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami. ‘The numbers just go to show—once again— that pundits and presumed communal representatives are flat-out wrong in assuming American Jews are hawkish on Iran or US policy in the Middle East in general.’

The problem with the poll is that the respondents assume that a deal will deliver the goods.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll covered that point with the significant notation “that a plurality of Americans – 46 percent – say they don’t know enough to have an opinion.”

If the J Street poll had asked, “Do you know enough about the pending deal to express an opinion,” the results undoubtedly would be close to the NBC/Journal poll.

The “Jewish support” claimed by the J Street poll is, in the Beacon’s words, for “a hypothetical deal that does not actually exist.”

President Obama’s love for J Street serves both him and the left-wing organization. J Street, like The New York Times, acts as a puppet for the President who in return makes it feel important by supplying the string.

J Street acts as if it is the spokesman for the entire Jewish community and effectively leaves the predominantly conservative Orthodox camp out of the playing field, much to President Obama’s joy.

His strategy is to show Congress that if the Jews back a deal with Iran, obviously it must be good for Israel because they know better than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu what is best for the Jewish state.

We are continuing to negotiate for the next couple of days. This does not mean we are extending our deadline.

If the language of a final agreement parallels her statement, and if a final deal is as meaningless as the deadlines, we are in big, big trouble.

“The entire agreement right now is at the mercy of a miscalculation on either side,” International Crisis Group analyst Ali Vaez told Bloomberg News. “There won’t be a deal until the last minute, while each side waits for the other to blink first.”

Previous deadlines were November 2013, July 2104, March 2015 and June 30.

Deadlines have become meaningless. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a briefing, We are not observing artificial deadlines.”

Thursday July 9 is the sixth deadline. That is the date Congress imposed for a 30-day review of an agreement, if one is reached. If negotiating continues beyond that date, Congress then will have 60 days for a review, and each day will make it more difficult for President Barack Obama to fight off arguments against a “bad deal.”

Iran sounds like the Palestinian Authority, which balked every time it had a chance to achieve just about everything it wanted in the form of concessions from Israel.

Perhaps the next deadline will be January 20, 2017, when President Barack Obama leaves office.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tehran declared Thursday “no agreement will be signed today and the six world powers are not due to sign any agreement today” despite P5+1 comments that a deal “is close but elusive.”

Iran has made mincemeat of President Barack Obama’s threat to “walk away” from the negotiations if a framework agreement was night signed by midnight March 31. In the end, the president phoned U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Earnest Moniz to tell them to hang in there if there were signs of progress.

Obama sounded tough in the American media, which said that the president told his representatives in Lausanne to tell Iran they indeed would “walk way” and leave sanctions in place, figuring that threat might make Iran a bit more flexible.

Iran is not that stupid not to figure that Obama would try to play games as Tehran is not twisting him around its little nuclear finger.

The truth was in a statement attributed to an official and reported by The York Times. He said:

They were turning our own deadline against us to see if we would give ground.

Perhaps one day, President Obama will give the orders to Kerry and Moniz to pack their bags and go home, and then maybe Iran will compromise. Or maybe it won’t.

In either case, Iran is making the West sweat it out and lose lots of political points back home, especially in Washington.

If Obama and the other nations in the P5+1 are giving Iran more time to put up or shut up, they won’t look so incredibly naïve if not ignorant, but Iran has a few points in its favor.

The talks have been extended for two days, and if Zarif’s statement of “no agreement” today comes true, the negotiations will drag on into Friday, if not longer.

You don’t have to read Zarif’s lips to understand his mind. He stated loud and clear Thursday:

We have always stated that there could be only ONE agreement which could go into effect at the end of the talks on July 1 if everything goes well.

The capital letters in the word “ONE” were published by the Iranian regime’s Fars News Agency.

Of course, he is playing games. There is nothing he would love more than a framework agreement that is so ambiguous that Iran can put Kerry and his Western partners through the wringer again in June, somewhere around a minute before midnight of a final agreement.

Zarif toyed with everyone with fantastic double talk:

[All issues] more or less resolved, but of course this does not mean that all issues that are to be touched in the final agreement have been specified. We are supposed to reach consensus and the delegations will start working on the text in the near future.

Things might grow difficult when drafting starts; now we believe that problems have almost been resolved.

After assuring everyone that progress is being made, he made out the West to be the real obstacle to a framework agreement, saying that “progress in talks depends on political will, and there has always been a problem with the political will of the opposite party.”

Iran also is playing to the hilt its advantage of conducting task with several delegations. Fars reported, “He [Zarif] said negotiations have become more complicated since several delegations are now meeting each other for bilateral and multilateral talks to discuss ‘their concerns, viewpoints and probably different approaches from both legal and political views.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu continued to lash out at a possible “bad deal” with Iran Monday and said, “The agreement being formulated in Lausanne sends a message that there is no price for aggression and on the contrary – that Iran’s aggression is to be rewarded.”

Netanyahu said in a statement:

The moderate and responsible countries in the region, especially Israel and also many other countries, will be the first to be hurt by this agreement. One cannot understand that when forces supported by Iran continue to conquer more ground in Yemen, in Lausanne they are closing their eyes to this aggression. But we are not closing our eyes and we will continue to act against every threat in every generation, certainly in this generation.

He told the Cabinet on Sunday that the task and the agreement in the works at Lausanne are part of Iran’s axis of evil than now includes Yemen.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is leaving the talks in Lausanne, Switzerland this afternoon and will return to Moscow but is ready to return if the P5+1 and Iran come to terms for a framework agreement.

Analysts are speculating that Foreign Minister Lavrov’s exit is a sign that no deal is imminent, but every opinion is up for grabs in what has become the center stage of an act that would put the world’s best novelist, Broadway producer or circus master to shame.

With all due respect to the experts who have at least a thousand words to say every time someone burps in Lausanne, only a master of evil can figure what is going in the mischievous and evil minds of Iran and Russia, one of the P5+1 powers and which has a vested interest in Iran’s nuclear development.

A Russian spokesman said that Lavrov “is ready to come back as soon as needed.”

However, his deputy will remain in Lausanne while U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of the other four Western powers face off against Iran towards tomorrow night’s deadline, which was set by President Barack Obama for a framework agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program.

After a one hour and 14 minute meeting this morning, new talks have been scheduled for 8:30 p.m., five hours later than previously planned.

Obama has said there will be no extension, but if Kerry and his colleagues see the possibility of a deal a day or two after the deadline, the president very likely would go back on his word.

Key issues dividing the two sides apparently are when sanctions would be removed and how much research and development Iran can continue.

The Obama administration is keeping Israel up to date on talks with Iran for an agreement to contain and supervise its nuclear program despite reports that Washington is fed up with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu because of his planned speech in Congress next month.

She cited as examples a meeting between Under Secretary Sherman and Israeli NSA Cohen and the Minister for Intelligence and Strategic Planning Steinitz in Munich and a subsequent meeting this week. “Iran negotiations were obviously the main topic of negotiations,” according to Psaki.

“As you know, Secretary Kerry regularly speaks to the prime minister about this issue, as well as many others,” she added, “And as our NSC colleagues have noted, NSA – National Security Advisor Rice maintains regular contact with her Israeli counterpart, National Security Advisor Cohen, on the full range of issues, including, of course, this issue…

“And reports that that has been cut off or we are no longer consulting are simply inaccurate…. As it relates to our relationship with Israel, our consultations on Iran are ongoing at many levels and many, many high levels, and reports over the weekend are just inaccurate.”